Alphabet Roadtrip

The Seattle Times Logo, Well Weathered Gothic

"Signs I Like" has been on a long vacation. But today I saw something I could not resist outside the Lighthouse coffee shop. I did the lettering for the Seattle Times masthead about twelve years ago, in association with Landor Seattle. Coincidentally the logo was featured in Logo Reviews a few days ago. The true test of a logo is how well does it stand the test of time? Here it is on a newspaper kiosk, rotated so you can compare it with the way it is used in the paper. I had nothing against that eagle, but I do like how abstract (and even more Gothic) this becomes without it. Perhaps someone liked it so much they tore it out to sew on their jeans:

My task was to look at every other Gothic newspaper masthead in America and come up with a subtle, very legible, fresh variation. Here is the before and after:

(I do not know who did the eagle, so unfortunately I can't credit them here.)

Masthead typography is uniquely challenging. Gothic is by its nature very difficult to read. It may look traditional and authoritative, but it is based on a completely zen principle: the space between letters and that magical yin/yang balance of darkness and light. This was a dream project. My father was publisher for eight years of the paper he started, The Auburn Citizen, which also had a Gothic masthead. This assignment connected me back through time to the long tradition of the small- town newspaper and work in the original public sphere. Websites, as convenient and up-to-the-minute as they are, do not age well; we will never admire their distressed and curling edges or how the wind transformed their serifs.

 See more typographic logotypes at Iskra Design.

Very Used: Curled Paint Font

   ©Ernest Hilsenberg

The way the paint has curled here the basic sans becomes cartoon lettering from the Flintstone era.

Open But Not, In Blue

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This pensive image from sculptor Ernest Hilsenberg could only really be blue don't you think? Between these two doors lies a saga of relationship. Framing a little shaken, trust battered then braced; decades of angry departures have shaken out the doorknobs. And yet still..... "open."

Bread in Bulgarian + Chestit Rozhden Den

 

This bread is 40 years old. And it still looks like bread. I love the sunny yellow disposition, the crusted rust, and the nice dimensionality of the toasted edges. Sent to me by the brilliant Bulgarian lettering artist and calligrapher Jordan Jelev, "The Label Maker."

 

And to complete the edible alphabets theme, here is the birthday cake make by Jordan's lovely wife Elitsa. Frosting is one of the hardest media to master. Like the floppy sign writing brushes of olde it has a mind of its own.

The Great Sea Wall of San Francisco and The Toy in Your Heart

At the very western edge of North America, where the last wagon, the last train, the last tricycle comes to its rolling stop before the Pacific Ocean is a place where a person might go to rest their head on concrete or read a book in the wind: The Great Highway. I spent an afternoon here a few years ago before it had been discovered as a writing surface. I sat with my back to the wall and my face turned to catch the rare heat of a spring sun and felt the anthems of immigrant America, of Pete Seeger, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, and every stoned out hippie of the Pan Handle playing beneath the wind and the roar of cars and surf. Such a satisfying bleakness, so relentless, yet warm with the company of epic multitudes.

Today images arrived from another traveler to this place. The complete text of the wall says: "The paint on the walls is more important than the toy in your heart."

Is this true?

Photos by Aaron Zube, painter and architect, San Francisco.

 

Farmacia Hope, With Lightbulb

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Here is a sign I could not resist from my recent two-week photo and art journey in Mexico. Given the healthcare debate going on in America and that Bartell's has just decided to stop filling Medicare prescriptions in my illustrious hometown of Seattle it's nice to think that you could go to the very small and very dusty ranchero village of El Tuito and still find some Esperanza in the Farmacia (it was a long long sign, so I cropped out the first word.) I especially like the attitude of friendship, humble yet eager, offered by the first E, the wind-up of the S, which tilts backwards as though just gathering strength to race forward, and the inimitable and ultra simple A's with the weight placed on the left rather than the right side rather as though that leg has been sprained and wrapped in extra bandages. Not to mention the diminutive 10 watt lightbulb. It takes very little illumination in Mexico to make the heart warm and the spirit lifted up.

No Smoking in Costa Rica

    Photographs  © Ernest Hilsenberg

These two signs from Ernest Hilsenberg's recent travels in Costa Rica have everything I covet in a piece of art. Texture, mystery, distress, elegance. And instructions for what you can and cannot do. Look at the exquisitely wrong letter spacing between the u and the m, the caprice of the flourished N, the vapor of smoke. Not to mention the shimmering ghost of the silver cigarette and the restrained iconography for "no."

As for the billboard, who needs Photoshop when you have weather and wallpaper paste? The color palette is classic Russian Constructivist.

Motel in Sun and Snow

Here is a weather-appropriate sequence as we enter the Thanksgiving weekend. Sent to me by photographer John Kane, whose work I first encountered during Tieton Days in Mighty Tieton, Eastern Washington. You will see this classic emblem of accommodations communication on the road to Fordair just north of Coulee City.

You can see more of John's work at http://www.johnakane.com

My Favorite Exit

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Just below this sign there is a stair, and it leads down. I found it on an oddly balmy gray day in October, an almost eerily gray day when small differences in tone cried out for distinction. This discreet invitation to hell peeks out from the bleachers at the end of Greenlake, where athletes leap the Mayan-temple-sized stairs and below them rowers whistle for their boats.

Echo Lake

                                                                                                                                                 

A prime example of nails and rust used as secondary visual element  © Iskra Johnson 2009

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I think of August as a field of back-lit hay, as faded cornflowers and delphiniums swaying in the wind and giving up their last petals. It is a month of exhaustion. The dogs are tired. The flowers are tired. The people too are tired, and I think they go to Echo Lake to take a long nap. This wonderfully bleak sign hangs next to a while-you-wait denture office just south of the tattoo parlor and north of the Drift On Inn, where you can play poker with the last of your IRA or have the lettuce and a pickle lunch special on Thursdays. Why not do both, especially if you are on a fixed income.

Exactly what do these strange puzzle pieces indicate? Is that a cluster of houses on the upper right? Where is the Lake? Perhaps the whole point is to let my imagination improve on the situation. Perhaps better that I don't know the lake is behind the Costco, that just before putting on your goggles and diving under you can hear cars gunning at the discount gas and people fighting each other for a parking place, that you're never sure if that is a beer can or a woman's shoe glinting underwater. 

As I took this photo wind chimes knocked together in the afternoon heat. Tucked into a broken downspout a bouquet of weeds tied in faded ribbon thanked me for stopping by.